Sexual Pleasure vs. Sexual Health: The Circumcision Trade-Off
Ronald Bailey | June 15, 2007, 11:37am
Recent research strongly suggests that male circumcision lowers the relative risk of HIV/AIDS infection in men. Statistics vary, but circumsion may reduce the risk of infection by about half. Consequently, some anti-AIDS campaigners in Africa are urging mass circumcision as a way to combat the spread of the disease.
However, it turns out that penile snips may have a cost--reduced sexual pleasure. The urology journal, BJU International, has published a study which tested the sensitivity of both cut and uncut men. According to the press release:
Adult male volunteers were evaluated with a 19 point Semmes-Weinstein monofilament touch-test to map fine-touch pressure thresholds of the penis. Circumcised and uncircumcised men were compared using mixed models for repeated data, controlling for age, type of underwear worn, time since test ejaculation, ethnicity, country of birth, and level of education.
Analysis of results showed the glans of the uncircumcised men had significantly lower thresholds than that of circumcised men (P = 0.040). There were also significant differences in pressure thresholds by location on the penis (p < 0.0001). The most sensitive location on the circumcised penis was the circumcision scar on the ventral surface. It was remarkable that five locations on the uncircumcised penis that are routinely removed at circumcision had lower pressure thresholds that the ventral scar of the circumcised penis.
This study suggests that the transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. It appears that circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.
Damn it! There's always a trade-off. And in this case, what a trade-off!
Reasonable | June 15, 2007, 1:18pm | #
If only it were so simple as a trade-off between public/personal health and sexual sensation/pleasure!
Sure, circumcision removes a whole lot of very sexually sensitive tissue. And yes, when done to an infant, his right to make his own choice is removed as well. It's for reasons like these that most of the world has abandoned circumcision. But for those who are already circumcised, why not try to prove that there's an up-side to it?
Of all things in the world to turn to in hopes of fighting HIV/AIDS, why cutting skin off penises? Could it be as simple as rock-pile owners looking to stone-soup to fill the world's hungry stomachs?
Non-hungry rock-pile owners want to know, so they find hungry areas of Africa, round up some hungry people, and give half of them a giant pile of stones, instructions and demonstrations on soup-making, and some spices and roots or beans for texture and flavor The other half of hungry Africans are told all about the wonders of stone-soup and how it's made, but get no stones (sure, stones are everywhere, but are they the right kind?).
Lo and behold, in the coming months, both groups become much less hungry, but the group with the stone piles became ever
more less hungry!
And thus it was proven that stone-soup, while not actually eliminating the need for
other food in the diet, is a hunger-fighting strategy to be deployed everywhere people are, or might one day become hungry. Eating
only stone-soup, they warn, is dangerous and likely to cause starvation.
International organizations plan massive stone-lifts. Stones of the just the right size and shape are to be offered at no-cost to the people who need them most.
Far away, those with an abundance of stones (though not at all hungry) feel more satisfied with their inventory.
Children born to the stone-wealthy are graciously granted a pile of stones at birth. Why leave to inheritance what you can watch your children
endure enjoy during your lifetime, like you did?
Learn how stone-soup is made. Delicious!
Educate Thyself | June 15, 2007, 2:23pm | #
The "circumision helps prevent HIV argument" is fatally flawed in several respects. See, e.g., http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/
1) The studies done to support this argument were methodologically unsound in a number of respects.
2) Circumcision has obviously not prevented the spread of HIV/AIDS in the US. Nor has presence of a foreskin caused mass infection in countries where most men are genitally intact. In fact, the HIV infection rate among heterosexuals in the US is 3.5 to 5 times higher than in Europe.
3) A higher rate of the circumcised men were infected in the Kenyan experiment than the intact control group in Uganda, where a "zero grazing" (anti-promiscuity) campaign has brought the rates down. Circumcised men are infected at a higher rate than intact men in Cameroon, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania.
And now we have the news from Amsterdam that the Langerhans cells of the foreskin are innocent of "importing HIV into the body" (as Szabo and Short claimed to find on the basis of cadaver foreskin tissue from 6 old men). So the foundations have been knocked away from the claim that "circumcision prevents HIV".
4) Psycho-cultural factors. The AIDS researchers who propose that circumcision can prevent HIV transmission are overwhelmingly, white, male, and the products of English-speaking nations where male circumcision was once the usual practice. Females are seldom, if ever, represented. Male researchers from nations that do not practice male circumcision are usually not amongst those who advocate circumcision to prevent HIV transmission. There are few, if any, South American, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, European, or Scandinavian males amongst those who advocate male circumcision to prevent HIV transmission.
In a comparison of studies performed by European vis-à-vis those performed by white male English-speaking researchers, the studies by white male English-speaking researchers have been more likely to report a protective effect for male circumcision. In the absence of another logical explanation for this effect, it is possible to conclude that the circumcision status of the researcher(s) may influence the conclusions of their studies
Circumcision in fact creates genital predjudice between those who have complete and intact gentials and those on whom circumcision has been imposed. This is what drives the campaign to circumcise.
